Christensen and a few of his Star Wars buddies will be on hand to present the award for Favorite Male Singer whose nominees include: LL Cool J, Usher, Nelly and Chingy.

The awards show will also reveal the celebrity hidden behind Hasbro's Darth Vader Voice Changer.

Wal-Mart stores all over the country will be Destination Star Wars this weekend as the first toys and other licensed products roll out for Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith. While over 3,000 domestic Wal-Mart Discount Stores and Supercenters will have plenty of Star Wars merchandise, many are featuring special Star Wars events you won't want to miss.

At 12:01 a.m. on April 2, all Wal-Mart stores that are open 24 hours will begin selling Revenge of the Sith toys and collectibles immediately, all at "Every Day Low Prices". Check your local store for hours of operation to find a 24-hour Wal-Mart store near you.

Starting at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, April 2 and continuing through Sunday, April 3, nearly 400 Wal-Mart stores across the country will be hosting the ultimate "48 Hours of the Force" Star Wars fan celebration that includes interactive toy & game demonstrations, Star Wars character appearances, and free Star Wars goodies all weekend long. Click here for a list of "48 Hours of the Force" Wal-Mart locations.

Fans young and old will be able to experience the new Episode III toys and games such as the new Star Wars Lightsaber Battle Game that connects to your TV with which you can train to be a Jedi and battle against Darth Vader! In addition, fans that try out Hasbro's new battle figure game, ATTACKTIX, will receive a free ATTACKTIX figure (while supplies last). And everyone will receive free goodies (while supplies last), such as a collectible poster and stickers, as well as snacks from Pepsi, Frito Lay, Masterfoods, Kelloggs and more.

And, for a limited time only, collectors will be able to purchase (while supplies last) the Wal-Mart "Early-Bird" Exclusive - classic reproductions of the first four original Star Wars action figures from 1977. Only available on April 2 & 3 at the Wal-Mart "48 Hours of the Force" tent stores and on walmart.com, the Early Bird is an exclusive every fan will want to add to his or her collection. When consumers purchase the Early Bird, they receive a certificate that they mail in to get the four Star Wars action figures: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, R2-D2, and Chewbacca. This mail-in figure promotion was done back in 1977 for the original Star Wars movie and Wal-Mart and Hasbro are pleased to bring it back to celebrate the last movie in the saga. Only a limited number will be available so fans will have to act fast before they're all gone.

Matt Stover's previously published works include Heroes Die, Blade of Tyshalle, and Iron Dawn. He has written two Star Wars novels already -- Traitor, a book in The New Jedi Order series, and the first hardcover of the Clone Wars novel series, Shatterpoint, wherein he examines Mace Windu's return to his war-torn homeworld.

With Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas's monumental epic draws to a close, tying together the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy. How did you feel when you wrote the final lines of the novelization?

I was shaking, and I practically burst into tears -- but that probably had a lot to do with the book being about six weeks over deadline, and that I'd been writing twelve to sixteen hours a day, fueled by Hershey's dark-chocolate Kisses and vast quantities of coffee and tortilla chips!

Once the adrenaline rush had faded, the feeling was primarily one of tremendous satisfaction. Not only has Mr. Lucas succeeded in tying together the entire six-film cycle (and elegantly, too), but I've managed to weave in a significant amount of the Expanded Universe material in as well -- having started in the Star Wars realm as an EU author, after all. I was really trying to bring the whole Star Wars Universe together in this story, and while Mr. Lucas, in his line-edit, decided to excise a fair amount of the EU material, he also left a fair amount of it in... so I guess that makes whatever's left just a hair short of "G canon," for all the purists out there.

I also, as anyone who has read my Star Wars fiction -- really, any of my fiction -- knows, have an almost overwhelming desire to lead people to question their assumptions and preconceptions... to unsettle them a little bit. I think the film, when people really look at it and start thinking about what it means in the context of the entire Star Wars saga, will do exactly that. This is not just a cotton-candy movie. Which made writing the novel an intensely satisfying experience.

Were you chosen to pen the novelization based on the positive reaction to your two other Star Wars books, Shatterpoint and Traitor?

Well... I'm not sure that positive is exactly the word. "Strong" might describe it better. While it seems that most fans liked the books, there's a sizable chunk of fandom that can't stand me or my work -- in fact, I think they have a club...

The word I got through Del Rey is that LucasBooks thought I was the best writer to handle the darkness of this story. I mean, that's a lot of what I'm known for, after all: the psychological breakdown of characters under extreme moral pressure. After reading the script, I surmised that another reason they might have wanted me for this story is my reputation for having a... certain touch with personal combat -- because there is a buttload of fighting in this story. Am I allowed to say buttload?

Well, there's a lot. As I went along, I found myself struggling to figure out just how many different ways one can narratively evoke Jedi (and Sith!) in combat ... (It turns out there's a buttload of those, too, in case anyone's interested.)

Did you work from a final script, or was the script evolving as you wrote? How much freedom did you have to improvise or fill in gaps in action and character motivation?

I worked from the script as it stood at the close of principal photography, though there were some plot changes and rewrites that I had to adjust to as Mr. Lucas got into the process of editing and reshoots. I stuck to the script(s) as closely as I thought was appropriate for a novel; there are necessities in novels -- where someone can go back and read a transition again and take the time to think, "Hey, wait, what just happened here?" -- that in a film you can scream on past and leave people to figure out later. Mr. Lucas gave me a great deal of leeway in dealing with the dialogue and the details of this and that, as long as I didn't alter the sense of the action. The one place where I really had no freedom at all was in the characters' motivations: Mr. Lucas had an exceptionally clear idea of exactly why everyone was doing what, and he wasn't about to allow me to mess around with that even a little bit. After all, the "Why" is what this story is really about... and the funny thing was, there didn't turn out to be any gaps in motivation. It was all there: a real depth of human insight went into the creation of this story, as simple as its shiny surfaces might appear to some people. When I couldn't understand why someone was acting in a particular way at a particular time, it turned out that I just hadn't been looking deeply enough. In the end, it all turned out so clear -- and for me, anyway, so true -- that the character arcs have the same tragic inevitability as the mechanics of the plot. In a very real sense, they are the mechanics of the plot.

When you met with George Lucas, what did the two of you discuss?

Mostly what I talked about above. I went into the meeting with a list of very detailed questions about "What was Master So & So thinking when he...?" and "Why, exactly, would Anakin want to..." I had a list of questions from Jim Luceno, too, relating to Labyrinth of Evil, and so we managed to get into quite a bit of the direct backstory -- the details of the relationship between the Lords of the Sith and exactly how and why the Separatists had set up the operation we see played out in the opening minutes of the film. And, of course, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the specifics of Anakin's fall -- what, exactly, drives him over the edge, when it happens, and what has led him to it. And, of course, we had to talk a bit about the dark side...

You mentioned bringing questions from Jim Luceno into your meeting with Mr. Lucas. How closely did the two of you work together on your respective books?

We corresponded quite a bit. I needed to understand how he was going to portray the relationship between the Sith Lords, and some other details of the backstory, especially where Obi-Wan and Anakin had been and exactly what they'd been up to, and I showed him the Introduction (the section that fills in a bit more detail of what's covered in the film's opening crawl) I had written to Revenge, that sort of thing. Fortunately for me, Jim is such a professional craftsman that by the time I was polishing the climax of Act One, I had a full draft of Labyrinth to work from, to minimize continuity issues. As I said above, part of my aim here was to create a novel that would work as part of the EU as well as a companion piece to the film. In fact, I understand that Jim's follow-up will, in a sense, bookend Revenge to make it the pivot of an EU trilogy that begins in Labyrinth and ends in Dark Lord. I'm looking forward to it.

The term "novelization" is used to describe your book, but perhaps it's more than that. A novelization is a film that has been, as it were, translated into book form; but your book, while faithful to the script of Revenge, goes beyond the mere transposition of one medium into another, which, sad to say, seems the fate of most novelizations.

I was never interested in writing novelizations. I'm still not. Especially not for Star Wars. It's too important to me. I didn't set out to write a novelization so much as I tried to back-create, from Mr. Lucas's story and script, a novel as I think it might have been if he had been making the film based on it, rather than the other way around. I wanted it to be not just a good novelization, but a good novel. A great story on its own terms. You should remember that I started as a fanboy, many years ago; I saw A New Hope more than twenty times in the theater. I saw The Empire Strikes Back nearly thirty times. When I was writing Shatterpoint, I dropped in a little piece of my personal history, just for my own amusement: the numeric recognition code that Mace exchanges with the Halleck, translated into numbers, is -- to the best of my recollection -- the date I first saw ANH. It was, appropriately, a Saturday matinee. I was fifteen. I rode my bicycle to the theater...

This is the point: most novelizations are written under extreme time pressure. They hire writers who are good and fast -- and they have to be fast. Me, I'm not fast... but they didn't ask me to be. I got the script in December of 2003, and I turned in the novel in August of 2004 -- that's almost triple the amount of time given to the usual novelization. And we were still working rewrites and adjustments -- to smooth over changes Mr. Lucas was making in the film during editing, and to accommodate the changes he made in his line-edit of the novel -- all the way to the first of this year. Because everyone -- not just me, but Del Rey, LucasBooks, LFL and Mr. Lucas himself -- thinks Revenge of the Sith is important enough that the book should be as good as it can possibly be.

Saber Slayer Caught!  

Final Chapter in Unveiling the Mysterious Monks

Where in the Galaxy

Eyes on the Starz/Where in the Galaxy Combined Featurette

WHAT DOES THE FORCE HAVE IN MIND FOR YOU?

Arianaeirlys has done an outstanding job with Issue #6, and I think you all will really enjoy it! So go have look at the latest Coruscant Courier Issue.